Åsne Seierstad questions a system that gives Anders Breivik publicity.

On 24 August, the verdict against Anders Behring Breivik will be pronounced at Oslo District Court. He has acknowledged having murdered 77 people and destroyed government buildings in Oslo last July but does not accept that he is guilty of any crime. This past week, others got the blame for not stopping his acts, including the man Breivik wanted to crush.

The perpetrator of the bombing and massacre was relegated to a minor role this month in Oslo. The words “blame” and “guilt” were frequently employed but this time not aimed at Breivik. The 22 July commission, an independent inquiry, has delivered its report to Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and, with it, devastating conclusions. The attack on Stoltenberg’s offices in the government area could have been prevented, its report claims, if measures already approved had been implemented. The authorities failed to protect the people who were massacred at a Labour Party youth camp on Utøya. Quicker police action was feasible and Breivik could have been stopped much earlier.

The report describes an almost total collapse in the planning and execution of the police action. Co-ordination failed totally and fatally: no nationwide alert, no roadblocks or observation posts set up, no attempt made to mobilise helicopters. The police work was worthy of a “failed state”, not the smoothly organised country we thought we lived in, the commentator Anders Giæver wrote.

The commission’s presentation included almost unbearably sad details, such as the witness who had seen Breivik leaving the bomb area with a gun in his hand. The witness called in the correct number of Breivik’s licence plates only ten minutes after the bombing. The operator wrote the message on a yellow Post-it note and it was given to the co-ordinator, but then left on a desk while Breivik drove out of town. For a long stretch of road he had a police car driving right behind him, suspecting nothing, as the message hadn’t been relayed further. Had he been stopped then, the whole massacre on Utøya could have been prevented.

The failures are numerous: the first policemen to arrive at the lakeside, 600 metres from Utøya island, never attempted to get a boat across to try to stop the killer, even though instructions said they should. The special police sent from Oslo passed them and drove three kilometres further due to a misunderstanding about the agreed meeting place, where they overloaded their dinghy so heavily that it almost sank and civilian boats had to come to their rescue. That was a good thing, as the police, for a while, had been heading to the wrong island.

Breivik killed on average one person every minute. So many lives could have been spared if the police work had been more efficient. Who is to blame? Whose head should roll? Who is to carry the burden of guilt?

Breivik must be rejoicing in his cell, where he has access to all the major Norwegian papers. The main headline in the tabloid newspaper VG after the inquiry made its presentation sent a not-so-subtle message to the prime minister: “Stoltenberg should go”. Breivik’s stated goal is to “crush the Labour Party”. Now the prime minister, who previously was hailed for his leadership after the attacks, is under sharp criticism for the lack of national security measures. Stoltenberg was praised when he spoke, soon after the massacre, of meeting the horror with more “openness, more humanity, but never naivety”. That last word has returned to haunt him. Because we weren’t prepared.

Notice me

So, how do we handle the man who is truly guilty? Are we prepared to punish the culprit in keeping with the standards of his crime?

Up till now, the killer has got everything he could wish for. The former high-school dropout – the nobody – became a somebody. The one who “was always there” but whom most people never remembered, has at last been noticed. Breivik has achieved worldwide notoriety. For the first time in his life he is undoubtedly uppermost in his father’s mind; the father who cut contact with him when he was 15.

To take the psychoanalytic approach: Anders grew up with an emotionally abusive mother who could oscillate between sweet talk and screaming her hatred for her son in a split second. But Anders quickly learned how to manipulate her and as the years passed the motherson power balance shifted in his favour. He later played these tricks skilfully on his captors, on the police and on the judges in court.

When finally the police captured him – three minutes after they arrived on the island, but having spent about an hour to get there – the first thing he said to the policeman sitting on top of him was: The quicker we can start the questioning, the sooner we can start negotiating. If you want to save 300 lives, you should listen to me carefully.

This negotiating tactic produced, among other things, access to a personal computer and a printer. During the trial his negotiations with the judge, Wenche Elisabeth Arntzen, showed similarities to those of a little boy with his mother. When Arntzen tried to cut the reading of his opening speech, which was filled with anti-Islamic rhetoric, he said: If you don’t let me read my full manuscript, I won’t talk at all. She gave in on the first day of the trial, and let him continue until he was through.

Now, in prison, waiting for his judgment, nothing prevents him from continuing to spread his message, freshly written every week on his cherished computer, then printed out and mailed to his followers. According to his lawyer, Breivik spends between eight and ten hours a day working. When the trial was over, at the end of June, he finally found time to sit down to read the 600 letters he had received from around the world, most of them from right-wing extremists in Germany, Sweden, Britain and Russia. VG got hold of two letters that Breivik recently sent; they were exact copies of each other; only the names differed.

In the letters, Breivik explained how he plans to keep fighting against the values of Norwegian society. Those same values that gave him a fair trial, lax treatment in prison and even the right to keep spreading his message. He writes in the letters that he plans three books: the first about the attack, the second about his ideology and the third about the future.

He is also forming a think tank named “Conservative Revolutionary Movement” and in a letter to a Russian follower he writes: “My goal is to develop a pan-European prison network consisting of European, patriotic martyrs and other politically motivated prisoners.” As he explained in his manifesto before the terror act, a trial is the best way to spread his message and so, up to now, everything has been going to plan.

As long as he or she doesn’t promote anything criminal, a prisoner in Norway has freedom of speech and the right to communicate with the outside world. All prisoners in Norway remain eligible to vote in elections. Breivik is careful in his letters not to advocate violence. But his very signature on a letter concerning a “conservative revolutionary movement” could be seen as an instigation to violence. He has often repeated that his mission is not over and, when asked in court whether he regrets his actions, has answered bluntly, “The only thing I regret is that I didn’t kill more people.”

His ten-week trial became a seminar of psychiatrists. In court, out of court, in the media, at conferences, the psychiatrists were quarrelling about differing diagnoses of mental illness that could be made on the mass murderer. All his apparent symptoms were analysed carefully by the forensic psychiatrists and the two teams appointed by the court came to opposite conclusions. The first team was convinced Breivik had been suffering from psychosis during his killing spree and thus can’t be punished according to Norwegian law. The second team concluded that he had been sane and can be punished for his crime. In Norway, putting a sick person in prison is considered a worse crime than treating a sane person on a psychiatric ward. This is one reason court psychiatrists wield greater power than their colleagues do in courtrooms in other countries.

Our system also dictates that, once a mentally ill person has been treated and declared sane, he must be allowed to go free. In most other countries he would then have to face the punishment for his crime. Curiously, in this case, neither health professionals at the prison nor any of the members of the observation team put together by the second couple of court psychiatrists has found any sign of psychotic behaviour. Synne Sørheim, from the first team of court psychiatrists, said during the trial that she is a “treatment optimist” and would treat Breivik with medication and conversation. It is hard to see what she will treat. His right-wing extremist ideas? His violent behaviour? His sense of being at war with social democracy and multiculturalism, evoking the “principle of necessity”?

One thing is clear, however – whatever the judgment is, Breivik will stay in the same topsecurity prison outside Oslo, in the three cells furnished for him. Should he be found insane, the health professionals will treat him inside the prison, a departure from the normal procedure of moving the patient to a hospital.

Breivik’s joint cells were recently classified by his lawyers as one sleeping cell; one “working cell”, with a writing desk, computer and printer; and one “fitness cell” with a treadmill. Breivik has said that he wants to study political science in prison and he has asked his followers to send him books and articles criticising the multicultural society and to enclose stamps. He has also asked for help from local rightwing bloggers willing to work with him. His computer is – unfortunately for him – offline but he doesn’t need his own blog: he can write letters, and others can post them on the web.
This past week, an anonymous letter from one of Breivik’s followers was sent to Norwegian newsrooms, signed by the “second cell of Breivik” acting under his influence.

Breivik has planned this well, his rise to fame from an early bleak life. He corrected “unemployed” to “writer” when asked for his status the first day in court. And this writer is certainly in a unique situation. What other terrorist in the world can sit in his cell and freely spread his propaganda, facilitated by the prison’s own equipment?

There is one thing that Breivik fears: that he will be judged insane. This would take away his aura of being an ideologue, a political prisoner. He would then just be a nobody again. Most of the surviving victims see the harshest punishment for him as isolation. They hope that someone will take away his computer, restrict his letter-writing and leave him alone in his cell with his thoughts and his guilt.

Åsne Seierstad is writing a book about the events of 22 July 2011 in Norway, to be published next autumn.